Paul Torday - Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

At a festival this summer I heard Paul Torday speak about his most recent book, about a man who drinks himself to death exclusively on fine French wines. He was an odd chap - a businessman for most of his life, he wrote his first novel, at the age of 59, to great reviews and, presumably, healthy sales. He seemed a bit nervous in front of a larger crowd than he might have been expecting (I think Maureen Lipmann was on next), and his responses to softball questions weren't particularly illuminating.

Anyway, I picked up his first novel with few expectations, to see what the fuss was about. And my conclusion is that I can see why people are reading it, but it certainly doesn't deserve the praise it's received.

The book is a satire upon modern government, although a very slight one, and not very well written. It has been praised for its innovative structure - the book is told in a variety of forms - emails, diary entries, newspaper clippings, transcripts of interviews, and no 'straight' authorial narrative - but this isn't so original, and it's hard to do well, to distinguish between the tones of the different forms. Torday largely fails to do this - the central character, Alfred Jones, supposedly speaks in interviews in exactly the same way that he writes his diary, which is, implausibly, in the manner of a novelist. There's little consideration to who the audience of each piece might be, so how the style should be adjusted - people in interviews don't reproduce conversations verbatim, nor become lyrical for no reason; they're far more guarded. Torday uses the forms as a device for telling the story in much the same manner as he would in a straight narrative, rendering them redundant, and in fact irritating by their inconsistency.

There are also inaccuracies that grate - Torday creates extracts from Hansard, but fails to understand the structure of PMQs. He also has a character, Alfred's wife, who is an Oxford-educated economist who has worked in a big international bank for twenty years, supposedly on the fast track, who earns £75,000 pa, and is very proud of this, even though it's smaller than the amount a woman in her position might expect in the real world by a large factor. Does this matter? To an extent it does. An effective satire needs to be rooted in the world it's lampooning, and while deviations from it can serve a comic purpose, inaccuracies such as these just distract, and highlight the author's lack of awareness. The latter example wouldn't matter so much if the author didn't make such a big issue out of her earnings.

The plot itself is merely passable, as farces go. A government that wants to distract the public from an unpopular Middle Eastern war latches on to a mad plan by a Yemeni sheikh to introduce salmon fishing to his country, despite the obvious unsuitability of the country for such a project. Alfred Jones is the government scientist deputed to find a solution. The climax is worthy of Ben Elton, but could have been written up a little more. There's not much more to the book - the characters are mostly two dimensional, it's witty in parts but the targets are barn-door wide. Good for the beach, when your brain is mush already, but no more demanding than that.

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Clive James - Cultural Amnesia

Most people know Clive James as the host of a variety of TV programmes in the 1980's and early 90s, all irreverent and mostly concerned with television around the world - he introduced British audiences to Japanese endurance shows, and may have contributed to the raising of the bar, and lowering of standards, in British reality TV. Not something to be particularly proud of, although I've no doubt he is. His laconic drawl and tortuous style was easily recognisable, and much mocked.

Plenty will also know of him as a memoirist, and also as a TV reviewer of some note. Fewer will know of him as a literary critic, but that is what he originally was, and I remember a teacher in the 80s, himself a noted poet and critic, telling me that James's poetry criticism was of high quality. This book is James's attempt to renew his reputation, and it's working - most reviews now refer to him as an Australian polymath rather than an ex-tv presenter, which must be gratifying.

And the book is largely about gratifying Clive James. He never neglects to tell us that he's read the authors mentioned in the original, or that the easiest way to learn a language is by reading an obscure writer's essays. And of course the namedropping, not just of authors read but of personalities met and charmed by the ubiquitous James.

The book is a collection of essays, inspired by quotations from notable people, not all of them authors, ordered alphabetically. The essays aren't always about the people concerned, although they are all prefaced by a brief biographical sketch, which is often the best part of the piece. Mostly they are digressions using the quotation as a starting point and mostly, for me, they don't work.

His main obsession is with the Jewish experience in Europe in the twentieth century, and he has a particular fascination for the Viennese intellectuals of the early part of the century, who are largely neglected in Britain. I hadn't heard of many of these writers, such as Lichtenberg and Altenberg, so it was stimulating to have new recommendations. And a particular favourite of his, to whom he devotes one of the largest chapters, is Stefan Zweig, who I'm also fond of.

The trouble with the essays is that few of them say anything worthwhile, and they're not particularly well written. James has a discursive, rambling style, that he obviously sees as a virtue, perhaps in the manner of Alistair Cooke's broadcasts. But Cooke's essays were remarkable because the digressions were always logical, and always led, miraculously, back to the initial premise. James digresses because of a pun or a coincidence, or just a poor analogy to set up a poorer joke, just for the sake of it. He also employs his favourite construction, a punning chiasmus, which is so familiar from his tv programmes that it's hard not to read it in his accent. This would matter less if he wasn't so obsessed with the writing style of his chosen authors, and so proud of his own - he has said, in an interview about this collection, that he has never written better.

James is plainly well-read, and broadly cultured, although there are huge gaps in his knowledge - films, for example, he appears to know little about, nor science. An introduction to James might say that he stretches from high literature to low television, but he leaps over much in between. That may appear to be a small quibble, but he does present himself as such a know-all that it's inadvertently funny when his ignorance shows through. More than once, for example, he refers to 'the fifth page of x's Google entry', which shows a lack of understanding of what Google is, and how dynamic searches change from day to day, rendering his reference inaccurate before it's even hit the page. The main essay on films is about the hairstyles in Where Eagles Dare, a fine example of James focusing on a banal inconsistency and flogging it to death.

It's hard for me to judge James's views on writers I'm unfamiliar with, although many of them aren't particularly worthwhile - to say that a writer was bad because he collaborated with the Nazis doesn't add much to the sum of human knowledge. He includes Goebbels and Hitler, and Thatcher purely to ridicule her for saying 'Solzhenitskin'. This is one of James's worst essays - he assumes Thatcher got the Russian writer's name mixed up with 'Rumplestiltskin', although there's no reason to believe it was any other than a slip due to unfamiliarity. He then wonders why no journalist apart from himself picked up on it (because it had no significance, perhaps?), and then admits that in his haste to put her down, he got Rumplestiltskin mixed up with Rip van Winkle rendering his satire harmless. The piece is a mess, but you can be sure James is rather proud of it.

There are one or two occasions when he's just plain wrong. He writes a paean to Mario Vargas Llosa, assuming, as he does throughout, that Llosa's political views are imitative of those in his novels, that a humanist writer standing for public office is necessarily to be praised, and that because his victorious opponent turned out to be corrupt, Llosa was vindicated. None of these are true. Alberto Manguel, who knows significantly more about South American politics than Clive James, has written a very impassioned essay about Llosa, who he despises precisely because his political opinions contradict the philosophy of his writing. Llosa has spoken in support of dictatorial regimes in the region, particularly in Argentina, and Manguel wonders whether the contradiction is unintentional, so Llosa has a double personality, or intentional, in which case neither his writing nor his politics can be trusted. James omits to say, or perhaps is unaware, that Llosa was leading the presidential election polls by a long way against a relatively unknown opponent, until his arrogant, patrician air put voters off him. For James, the fact that Lloisa is a good writer is justification enough.

The worst aspect of the book is that James just doesn't know how to construct an argument. His points would be more graspable if they were clearer, but he's always distracted by the irresistible witticism that adds nothing to the case. In the end he comes across as a bit of a bore.

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Harold C Schonberg - The Lives of the Great Composers

I am a novice fan of classical music. I didn't grow up with it or learn an instrument, and I didn't appreciate more than the most obvious cliches until quite recently, and even now most of it is impenetrable to me. But since last year I've regularly attended concerts on the South Bank, starting with familiar pieces such as Mozart's Requiem and Beethoven Symphonies, trying to understand the appeal, or just to relax and appreciate the music for its own sake.

While, as with art appreciation, I was trying to divorce the emotional reaction to a piece from the intellectual knowledge of its creator, there comes a time when the most elemental knowledge, of chronology and influences, becomes useful for a better appreciation. This hefty overview of the history of classical music provides that.

Schonberg is an American music professor, and his approach is non-technical, aimed at the untrained amateur. There's far more about the lives of the composers, following the title, than the music. It's hardr for me to question the veracity of the contents, but there's an extensive bibliography which I may use to follow up on specific composers. Schonberg obviously has his biases, and he justifies a composers worth often on how much of his works survive in the modern repertory. This leads to contradictions - Rachmaninov, despite criticisms of his lack of rigour, is proven solely because he remains extremely popular, yet Charles Ives, plainly a particular interest to an American music professor, is a genius who is not yet fully appreciated. Schonberg is also a traditionalist - while he understands what modern music is trying to do, he doesn't necessarily agree that it's worthwhile or as profound as the composers and audiences claim.

This is a good introduction to the history of classical music, unpretentious and well-organised, although pretty huge - I read it two chapters at a time over about a month.

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Giles Bolton - Aid and other dirty business

There are many questions that arise when considering the state of foreign aid to the developing world. How is it that Africa is still so poor when the continent has received an estimated $300bn over the last 30 years? Can aid money actually be counterproductive to an economy? Is there any point in giving a country money if their government is so corrupt it won't reach those it's intended for? Giles Bolton addresses these questions and others in this highly readable introduction to the issues affecting foreign aid.

Bolton writes as a practitioner rather than an academic, although the book is adequately researched. He worked for DFID for a few years in Rwanda and Kenya, and draws on this experience, not least in his amusing anecdotes that occasionally help to illuminate the text. He's very good at showing the effect of aid policies on the ground in Africa, but is also capable of drawing back and showing the economic arguments and the political realities, having worked for the British government and been exposed to the debate at the highest level.

It was a particularly pertinent time to read this, as the latest World Economic Summit in the Doha round of the WTO was underway. This was a critical event - there are trade barriers and subsidies, including the infamous CAP in Europe, that are ruinous to the attempts by developing countries to access markets for their products. Bolton gives examples of specific markets that are rigged against developing countries - sugar is a notorious one - and shows how they have arisen - initially out of the post-war need for Europe to become self-sufficient in food - and how hard it is to remove the subsidies now. For the uninitiated, some of the facts of the debate will be startling - European taxpayers pay $2.5 per day for every cow in Europe, while there are 300 million Africans living on under $1 per day (Japanese cows are even more pampered, getting $7 per day)

Bolton deals with the various different sources of aid - individual donations to charities, which are mainly spent on small projects, direct aid from governments, which are mostly spent on larger projects, and assistance from the World Bank. He draws distinctions between the sources and applications of these funds, and their effectiveness on the ground. His tone is refreshingly unhysterical, despite the seriousness of the problem, and he has a talent for presenting complex issues in a simple way.

This is a very good primer to foreign aid. There wasn't a huge amount in it I didn't know from other sources (he cites in the bibliography a book I helped to edit), but it was useful to have all the major issues presented together in a straightforward manner. One drawback is that the book is exclusively about aid to Africa, because that's Bolton's prior experience, but the same arguments are relevant to developing countries elsewhere.

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Dinaw Mengestu - Children of the Revolution

Dinaw Mengestu is a 30 year old Ethiopian who immigrated to the United States at the age of two, following his father who was forced to flee the Red Terror of Mengistu Haile Mariam. His first novel is about an Ethiopian immigrant living in Washington DC, Sepha Stephanos, who came to the US at the age of nineteen, and after 17 years runs a small, unsuccessful general store. The novel is therefore a mixture of personal experience, of growing up as an immigrant, and a translation of observed and secondhand experiences of the Ethiopian diaspora.

Sepha has managed to extricate from the huddle of Ethiopians who have taken over a whole apartment block, and who have, to the best of their ability, replicated the village and family units they knew back in Addis. After a few menial jobs, he was encouraged to open a general store using a government business grant. But he doesn't have any entrepreneurial talent, nor any business ambition, and he struggles to break even. His closest friends are also African - Joseph, a Congolese waiter, and Kenneth, a Kenyan businessman - and their meetings are full of spurious nostalgia for Africa. Kenneth and Joseph encourage Sepha through his business troubles, and vicariously enjoy his romantic liaisons, fleeting as they are, but Joseph and Stephanos both regret the studies not pursued and the frustrations of lives not meeting expectations.

The liaison in the book is with his neighbour, Judith, a white academic single mother, whose daughter is the child of a Mauritanian academic, from whom Judith is separated. It emerges that she is looking for a father for her precocious daughter, but Sepha, in his well-meaning inexperience, eludes her obvious attempts at seduction and misses the chance he knows is there.

This is the most successful part of the book, Mengestu handles the relationship with sympathy and dexterity, such that the motivations of each character are clear and credible. He has a talent for emotional narrative, and this novel is engaging throughout. The main theme is of the illusion of the land of opportunity, but there are also currents of upheaval, integration and the volatile underclass of America. Mengestu's talent with this debut novel has already been recognised - it won the 2007 Guardian First Book Award.

www.amazon.co.uk

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